Natural Acts

by David Quammen

  Fay pauses over a pile of gorilla shit, recognizing seeds of Marantes glabra as a hint about this animal’s recent diet. Farther on, he notes the hole where a salt-hungry elephant has dug for minerals. Farther still, the print of a yellow-backed duiker, one of the larger forest antelopes. Each datum goes into the notebook, referenced to the minute of the day, which will be referenced in turn by his GPS to longitude and latitude at three decimal points of precision. Years from now, his intricate database will be capable of placing that very pile of gorilla shit at its exact dot in space-time, should anyone want to know.

  When it comes time to ford the Mopo, Fay wades knee-deep into the channel with his video camera pressed to his face. Spotting a dark lump against the white sand, he gropes for it one-handed, still shooting. “Voilà. A palm nut.” He shows me the hard, rugose sphere, smaller than a walnut, light in weight but heavy with import. It’s probably quite old, he explains. He has found thousands like this in his years of wading the local rivers, and carbon-dating analysis of a sizable sample revealed them to be durable little subfossils, ranging back between 990 and 2,340 years. Presumably they wash into a stream like the Mopo after centuries of shallow burial in the soil nearby. What makes their presence mysterious is that this species of palm, Elaeis guineensis, is known mainly as an agricultural species, grown on plantations near traditional Bantu villages at the fringe of the forest and harvested for its oil. Elaeis guineensis seems to need cleared land, or at least gaps and edges, and to be incapable of competing in dense, mature forest. The abundance of ancient oil-palm nuts in the river channels suggests a striking possibility: that a vast population of early Bantu agriculturalists once occupied this now vacant and forested region. So goes Fay’s line of deduction, anyway. He hypothesizes that those proto-Bantus cut the forest, established palm plantations, discarded millions or billions of palm nuts in the process of extracting oil, and then vanished, as mysteriously as the Anasazi vanished from the American Southwest. Some scholars argue that natural climate change over the past three millennia might account for the coming and going of oil palms, the natural ebb and return of forest, but to Fay it doesn’t make sense. “What makes sense,” he says, “is that people moved in here, grew palm nuts, and then died out.” Died out? From what? He can only guess: maybe warfare, or a killer drought, or population overshoot leading to ecological collapse, or severe social breakdown resulting from some combination of such factors. Or maybe disease. Maybe an early version of AIDS or Ebola or bubonic plague emptied the region of people, more or less abruptly, allowing the forest to regrow. There’s no direct evidence for this cataclysmic depopulation, but it’s a theme that will recur throughout Fay’s hike. Meanwhile, he drops the palm nut into a Ziploc bag.

  Just beyond the Mopo, we sneak up on a group of gorillas feeding placidly in a bai, a boggy clearing amid the forest. We approach within thirty yards of an oblivious female as she works her way through a salad of Hydrochoris stems. Fastidiously, she nips off the tender white bases, tossing the rest aside. Her face is long and tranquil, with dark eyes shaded beneath her protrusive brow. The hair on her head is red, Irish red, as it generally is among adult lowland gorillas. Her arms are huge, her hands big and careful. Leaving me behind, Fay skulks closer along the bai’s perimeter. When the female raises her head to look straight in his direction, the intensity of her stare seems to bring the whole forest to silence. For a minute or two she looks puzzled, wary, menacingly stern. Then she resumes eating. Fay gets the moment on zoom-lens video. Later he tells me that he froze every muscle while she glowered at him, not daring to lower the camera, not daring to move, while a tsetse fly sucked blood from his foot.

  The video camera, with its soundtrack for verbal annotations and its date-and-time log, is becoming one of his favorite tools. He shoots footage of major trees, posing a Pygmy among the buttresses for scale. He shoots footage of monitor lizards and big unidentified spiders. He shoots footage, for the hell of it, of me floundering waist-deep in mud. Occasionally he does a slow 360-degree pan to show the wraparound texture of a patch of forest. And when I alert him that a leech has attached itself to one of the sores on his right ankle, he videos that. Then he hands me the camera while Madzou burns the leech off with a lighter, so that I can capture the operation from a better angle.

  Just before noon he inspects another fresh mound of elephant dung, poking his finger through the mulchy gobs. Elephants in this forest eat a lot of fallen fruit, but just what’s on the menu lately? He picks out seeds of various shape and size, identifying each at a glance, reciting the Latin binomials as he tosses them into a pile: Panda oliosa, Tridesmos stemon, Antrocaryon klaineana, Duboskia macrocarpum, Tetropleura tetraptera, Drypetes gosweilieri, and what’s this other little thing, can’t remember, wait, wait…oh yeah, Treculia africana. As I squat beside him, impressed by his knowledge and scribbling the names, he adds: “Of course, this is where you get footworms, standing in elephant dung like this.”

  We make camp along a tributary of the Mopo. The Pygmies erect a roof beam for the main tarp and a log bench for our ease before the campfire. According to the topofil, Madzou reports, our day’s progress has been 33,420 feet. Not a long walk, but a full one. After dark, as Fay and Madzou and I sit eating popcorn, there comes a weird, violent, whooshing noise that rises mystifyingly toward crescendo and then crests—as, whoa, an elephant charges through camp, like an invisible freight train with tusks. Sparks explode from the campfire as though someone had dropped in a Roman candle, and the Pygmies dive for safety. Then, as quickly, the elephant is gone. Anybody hurt? No. Dinner is served and the pachyderm in the kitchen is forgotten, just a minor distraction at the end of a typical day on the Megatransect.

  Fay spent the late 1980s at a site in southern CAR, gathering data on the resident gorillas. He was particularly curious about their food choices (all gorillas are vegetarian, but their local diets reflect the plant availabilities of a given ecosystem) and their nesting behavior. The lowland gorilla, like the chimpanzee, is known to build sleeping nests from bent or interwoven branches, and with gorillas those nests are sometimes elaborate. Every gorilla above weaning age makes such a nest, simple or fancy, almost every night. By counting nests, therefore, a biologist can estimate gorilla population density; and from nest counts and other evidence left behind as the animals move, inferences can be drawn about group size, demographic composition, and social organization. In other words, a researcher can learn much without even seeing gorillas.

  One of the methods Fay used was a standard line-transect survey, which involved cutting straight trails through his study area, creating a rectilinear grid, and then walking the trails repeatedly to count and plot nests. Fay’s study-site grid, spanning floodplain and lowland forest from the Sangha River to a smaller stream that ran parallel, was just 3.3 miles wide. He could march all through it, gathering data as he went, in a day. Another of his methods, which proved more congenial to his disposition, was what he labeled a “group follow.”

  He hit upon this technique, from necessity, toward the end of his fieldwork period. The gorillas were skittish. They generally fled from any contact with humans—that is, mutual visibility or intrusive proximity. Earlier on, Fay had spent a lot of effort trying to habituate certain gorilla groups to his presence. That was difficult, he found. But if a group of gorillas was followed and not contacted, there was no need for habituation. He could stay near the group indefinitely—out of sight, beyond earshot—and leave them none the wiser while he collected data from their abandoned nests, their dung, and other residual clues. So he started to shadow them that way.

  It required keen tracking skills. Fay enlisted those skills in the person of a brilliant Pygmy tracker named Mbutu Clement, a member of the Bambendjellé clan, who became his mentor and friend. With Mbutu’s guidance, he would follow a group of gorillas discreetly but persistently for all of one day or several, holding back at enough distance (several hundred yards) to keep them unaware of his presence. Among the clues Mbutu
used were chewed-upon stems of Haumania dankelmaniana, the thorny creeper, which gorillas find toothsome. Because its tissue oxidizes quickly when exposed to air, a freshly gnawed stem of Haumania retains its whitish inner color for only about five minutes; after ten minutes, it has turned black. Fay and Mbutu tried to stay within the five-minute range of a gorilla group without being perceived. Such fastidious tracking allowed Fay to learn what the gorillas had been eating, how many nests they had built, how often they shat, and what their group size, ages, and gender composition might be, while minimizing the chance that he’d spook them.

  Near the end of the study, in late 1988, he and Mbutu followed one group for twelve days, dawn to dark each day, resting and eating and walking in synchronic rhythm with the gorillas. From a reading of his eventual dissertation, it seems that “the twelve-day follow,” as he called it, was a high point in his academic fieldwork. It was also a foundational bit of experience for what he would later attempt in the Megatransect.

  He returned to grad school in St. Louis meaning to write that dissertation, but after a few months he shoved it aside (not to be finished until eight years later) and flew back to Africa, seizing the irresistible distraction of more fieldwork. His new assignment was to do some surveys of forest elephants in northern Congo. He inherited this project from a biologist colleague who had developed the methodology, gotten the grant, and then found himself laid up with a broken back. Fay took over, choosing to focus the survey on three remote, difficult ecosystems: an area near the Gabonese border known as Odzala, a vast swampland to the east known as Likouala aux Herbes, and, farther north, a zone of trackless forest between the Nouabalé and Ndoki Rivers.

  Teaming up with an adventuresome Congolese biologist named Marcellin Agnagna, Fay set himself the delectable (to him) task of traversing all three areas on foot. Elephant data would be the purpose and the result, but the bush travel would be its own reward. For the Odzala trek, they began at a town called Mbomo. “People were amazed that we were going to just walk from Mbomo to Tshembe, which in a straight line is like 130 Ks across the forest,” Fay recalls. “The villagers thought we were out of our minds.” A year later he returned for a second survey trek in the Nouabalé-Ndoki area, where he had found such a wonderland of undisturbed forest that it would eventually, after much determined but deft politicking by Fay and others, become one of Congo’s most treasured national parks. By 1994, Fay himself was director of this Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park project, on a management contract between the Republic of Congo government and the Wildlife Conservation Society. He based himself at a village called Bomassa, on the east bank of the upper Sangha River. Although his administrative duties had grown heavy and his political reach had lengthened, he still slid out for a two-or three-week reconnaissance hike whenever the necessity or the excuse arose. And soon after that he began to brainstorm about applying his leg-power approach on a whole different scale.

  His widened perspective came literally from the sky: a hundred feet above the canopy in a Cessna 182. Back in St. Louis he had gotten pilot training, and by 1996 he had found grant money to buy the Cessna. He began flying low-altitude excursions over Congo, Gabon, and the neighboring countries, scanning the landscape as though it were a colorful map on his coffee table, taking himself down to the altitude of parrots and hornbills above areas no road had ever crossed. He logged a thousand hours. He saw the real texture of what was out there—the hidden bais where elephants gathered, the thick groves of Marantaceae vegetation representing bounteous gorilla food, the fishing settlements along small rivers, the poachers’ camps secreted in the outback, the Bantu villages, and the great zones of forest where neither settlements, camps, nor villages had yet arrived. “Everything came together because of the airplane,” Fay says. “It gave me the big picture.” The big picture as he soon sketched it was of a single grandiose hike, complemented with overflights for aerial videography, that would seek to embrace, sample, quantify, interconnect, and comprehend as much of the Central African forest as humanly possible. After more than a year of planning, enlisting collaborators (among whom Nick Nichols was crucial, for his great influence at National Geographic magazine, for which he was a staff photographer), gathering permissions from governments, selling his vision to sponsors, arranging logistical support, packing, and further flying, he parked the Cessna and started to walk.

  On the afternoon of Day 5 we enter Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, crossing the Ndoki River in dugout canoes, then paddling up a deep blackwater channel through meadows of swaying Leersia grass and continuing onward by foot. We spend the last hour before sunset walking through a rainstorm so heavy it fills the trail with a cement-colored flood. On Day 7 we skirt the perimeter of Mbeli Bai, a large clearing much frequented by elephants and gorillas. Fay’s first glimpse of this bai back in 1990, he tells me, was an ugly experience: He found six elephant carcasses, some with their tusks already hacked out, others left to rot until the extraction would be easier. The park hadn’t yet been decreed, and poaching was rampant. In recent years the situation is much improved. The park has also brought protection to giant trees of the species most valued for timber, such as Entandrophragma cylindricum, informally known as sapelli, one of the premium African mahoganies. Pointing to a big sapelli, he says, “There’s something you wouldn’t see on the other side of the river”—that is, west of the park, where selective logging has already combed away the most formidable trees. Later he notes a mighty specimen of Peracopsis alata, far more valuable even than sapelli. A log of Peracopsis that size is like standing gold, Fay says, worth about $30,000 coming out of the sawmill. Spotting another, he changes his metaphor: “If sapelli is the bread-and butter-around here, Peracopsis is the caviar.”

  We linger through midafternoon with a group of eerily brash chimpanzees, which have gathered at close range to watch us. The chimps hoot and gabble and grunt, perching in trees just overhead, sending down pungent but unmalicious showers of urine, scratching, cooing, thrashing the vines excitedly, ogling us with intense curiosity. One female holds an infant with an amber face and huge, back-lit orange ears, neither mother nor baby showing any fear. A young chimp researcher named Dave Morgan, who has joined us for this leg of the hike, counts eleven individuals, including one with a distinctively notched left earlobe.

  It’s a mesmerizing encounter, both for us and for them, but after two hours with the chimps we push on, then find ourselves running out of daylight long before we’ve reached a suitable campsite. None of us wants a night without water. We grope forward in the dark, wearing headlamps now, cutting and twisting through kaka zamba, finally stumbling into a sumpy, uneven area beside a muddy trickle, and Fay declares that this will do. Early next morning we hear chimps again, calling near camp. With Morgan’s help, we realize that it’s probably the group from yesterday, having tracked us and bedded nearby. Camp-following chimps? Aren’t they supposed to be terrified of humans, who commonly hunt and eat chimpanzees throughout Central Africa? The sense of weird and unearthly comity only increases when, on Day 8, we cross into an area known as the Goualougo Triangle.

  At 4:15 that morning I’m awake in my tent, preparing for the day’s walk by duct-taping over the sores and raw spots on my toes, ankles, and heels. To travel the way Mike Fay travels is hard on the feet, even hard on his feet, not because of the distance he walks but because of where and how. After a week of crossing swamps and stream channels behind him, I’ve long since converted to Fay’s notion of the optimal trail outfit—river sandals, shorts, one T-shirt that can be rinsed and dried. But the problem of foot care remains, partly because of the unavoidable cuts, stubs, and slashes inflicted by the Haumania dankelmaniana vine and other hazards, and partly because the sandy mud of Congolese swamps has an effect like sandpaper socks, chafing the skin away wherever a sandal strap binds against the foot. So I’ve adopted the practice of painting my feet with iodine every morning and night, and (at the suggestion of another tough Congo trekker, a colleague of Fay’s named Steve Blak
e) using duct tape to cover the old sores and protect against new ones. The stuff holds amazingly well through a day of swamp-slogging, and although peeling off the first batch isn’t fun, removal becomes easier on later evenings when there’s no more hair on your feet. Since I’ve got a small roll of supple green tape as well as a larger roll of the traditional (but stiffer, less comfortable) silver, I even find myself patterning the colors—green crosses over the tops of the feet, green on the heels, silver on the toes: a fashion statement. If my supplies of iodine and tape can be stretched for another ten days and my mental balance doesn’t tip much further, I’ll be fine.

  At 4:30 A.M. I hear Dave Morgan, awake now in the tent beside mine, beginning to duct-tape his feet.

  Over breakfast, Fay himself asks to borrow my tape for a few patches on his toes and heels. I give him the silver, selfishly hoarding the green. Then again we walk.

  Demarcated by the Goualougo River on one side, the Ndoki River on another, the Goualougo Triangle is a wedge-shaped area extending southward from the southern boundary of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. In other words, it’s ecologically continuous with the park but not part of it statutorily, and isolated from the wider world by the two rivers. Having already made our Ndoki crossing, we enter on solid ground from the park.

  The Triangle embraces roughly 300 square kilometers of primary forest, including much excellent chimpanzee habitat, a warren of elephant trails, and an untold number of big sapelli trees, all encompassed within a logging concession held by a company called Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), the largest surviving timber enterprise in northeastern Congo. With two sawmills, a shipyard, a community hospital, and logging crews in the forest, CIB employs about 1,200 people, mostly in the towns of Kabo and Pokola, along the Sangha River. Although the company has shown willingness to collaborate with WCS on management of a peripheral zone south of the park, especially toward restricting the commercial trade in bushmeat (wild species killed for food) coming out of the forest, tension now seems to be gathering around the issue of the Goualougo Triangle. Mike Fay originally hoped to see that wedge of precious landscape included in the park, but when the boundaries were drawn, in 1993, the Goualougo was lined out. About the same time, CIB acquired the concession from another logging company that went into receivership. After a half-decade of benign inattention, CIB now wants to move toward logging the Goualougo, or at least to conduct an on-the-ground assessment of the timber resource and the costs of extracting it. That assessment—a prospection, in the jargon of Francophone forestry—will put a price tag on the Triangle. Meanwhile the company, in a spirit that mixes cooperation with hardheaded bargaining, has invited WCS to do a parallel prospection, theirs to assess the area’s biological value. Weeks after returning from the Congo, I hear CIB’s position on the Goualougo put by the company’s president, Dr. Hinrich Stoll. “You cannot just say, ‘Forget about it, it is completely protected,’” he tells me by phone from his office in Bremen, Germany. “We all want to know how much it is worth.” Once its worth has been gauged, both in economic and in biological terms, also in social ones, then perhaps the international community of conservationists and donors will see fit to compensate his company—yes, and the working people of Pokola and Kabo, Dr. Stoll stresses—for what they’re being asked to give up.